A cable from an unnamed news agency quotes, in Spanish, an interview that Jorge Luis Borges gave to the French magazine Le Magazine Littéraire. It appears, dated in Paris, in the newspaper La Opinión, of Buenos Aires, sometime in the ’70s with the title “Borges expressed the desire to try marijuana and gave his opinion on absinthe”. Apparently, in that conversation with the writer Serge Bramly, the Argentine was encouraged to talk about drugs.
In another interview, of which we do not know the date either, speaking with the Colombian poet Harold Alvarado Tenorio, Borges even dared to offer some details.
– Good tongues have told me that you knew certain drugs…
– Yes, but I failed with cocaine and marijuana. I did several candid experiments, five or six. And with the cocaine, yes, I felt garrulous, but very nervous. With marijuana, on the other hand, I felt absolutely nothing.
(The word garrulous, applied to a bird, means that the bird in question sings or chirps a lot. When used of a human, it is simply an adjective for a talkative person.)
Borges, it is known, was a joker. Was he serious when he exposed himself in front of Bramly or Alvarado Tenorio? Hard to tell. Maybe he doesn’t care much either.
What is worth it are the snippets of the interview with Le Magazine Littéraire that survive in a half-cut.
“I don’t know if alcohol gives people something. It is not known if he added something to Baudelarie, or to Poe, or if they wrote despite the alcohol, ”reflected the man who wrote“ El Aleph ”chatting with the other man, French but born in Tunisia.
And he continued, releasing in passing, as if nothing had happened, a philosophical mini-bomb that professional philosophers would take centuries to design: Did Baudelaire and Poe write thanks to or despite alcohol?
“It’s impossible to know,” says Borges in this interview that the editor of the Culture pages of La Opinión fortunately had the idea of publishing, “because if you take one path… you don’t follow the other, right? You’d have to bifurcate life”.
These are the types of garrulous we never tire of hearing… chirp.
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